Millions of people participate in online peer-to-peer support sessions, yet there has been little prior research on systematic psychology-based evaluations of fine-grained peer-counselor behavior in relation to client satisfaction. This paper seeks to bridge this gap by mapping peer-counselor chat-messages to motivational interviewing (MI) techniques. We annotate 14,797 utterances from 734 chat conversations using 17 MI techniques and introduce four new interviewing codes such as chit-chat and inappropriate to account for the unique conversational patterns observed on online platforms. We automate the process of labeling peer-counselor responses to MI techniques by fine-tuning large domain-specific language models and then use these automated measures to investigate the behavior of the peer counselors via correlational studies. Specifically, we study the impact of MI techniques on the conversation ratings to investigate the techniques that predict clients' satisfaction with their counseling sessions. When counselors use techniques such as reflection and affirmation, clients are more satisfied. Examining volunteer counselors' change in usage of techniques suggest that counselors learn to use more introduction and open questions as they gain experience. This work provides a deeper understanding of the use of motivational interviewing techniques on peer-to-peer counselor platforms and sheds light on how to build better training programs for volunteer counselors on online platforms.

通过捕获文本表示的组成性，大型语言模型在各种自然语言处理任务中取得了成功。尽管它们取得了巨大的成功，但这些向量表示未能捕获惯用多字表达式（MWES）的含义。在本文中，我们专注于使用二进制分类检测惯用表达式。我们使用一个数据集，该数据集包括英语和葡萄牙语中MWE的字面用法和惯用性。此后，我们在两个不同的设置中执行分类：零射门和一个镜头，以确定给定的句子是否包含成语。 n个任务的n射击分类是由训练和测试集之间的n个常见成语数定义的。在本文中，我们在设置中训练多个大型语言模型，并在零射击设置中获得0.73的F1分数（宏），一个射击设置为0.85的F1分数（宏）。可以在https://github.com/ashwinpathak20/idiomation_detection_using_using_few_shot_learning上找到我们工作的实现。

从Chaser Spacecraft发射的系绳网提供了有希望的方法，可以在轨道中捕获和处理大型空间碎片。该系绳网络系统受到影响和致动的几种不确定性来源，影响其净爆发和关闭控制的性能。然而，设计控制动作的早期可靠性的优化方法仍然具有挑战性，并计算到相对于追逐者相对于追逐者的不同发射方案和目标（碎片）状态概括。为了搜索一般和可靠的控制策略，本文介绍了一种加强学习框架，它集成了具有净动力学模拟的近端策略优化（PPO2）方法。后者允许评估基于网络的目标捕获的剧集，并估算捕获质量索引，作为PPO2的奖励反馈。在这里，在任何给定的发射方案下，学习的策略旨在根据移动网和目标的状态来模拟网络结束动作的定时。考虑了随机状态转换模型，以便在国家估算和发射致动中纳入合成不确定性。随着培训期间的显着奖励改进，训练有素的策略表明捕获性能（在广泛的发射/目标场景范围内），接近基于可靠性的优化在各个方案上运行。

Our paper aims to analyze political polarization in US political system using Language Models, and thereby help candidates make an informed decision. The availability of this information will help voters understand their candidates views on the economy, healthcare, education and other social issues. Our main contributions are a dataset extracted from Wikipedia that spans the past 120 years and a Language model based method that helps analyze how polarized a candidate is. Our data is divided into 2 parts, background information and political information about a candidate, since our hypothesis is that the political views of a candidate should be based on reason and be independent of factors such as birthplace, alma mater, etc. We further split this data into 4 phases chronologically, to help understand if and how the polarization amongst candidates changes. This data has been cleaned to remove biases. To understand the polarization we begin by showing results from some classical language models in Word2Vec and Doc2Vec. And then use more powerful techniques like the Longformer, a transformer based encoder, to assimilate more information and find the nearest neighbors of each candidate based on their political view and their background.

When robots learn reward functions using high capacity models that take raw state directly as input, they need to both learn a representation for what matters in the task -- the task ``features" -- as well as how to combine these features into a single objective. If they try to do both at once from input designed to teach the full reward function, it is easy to end up with a representation that contains spurious correlations in the data, which fails to generalize to new settings. Instead, our ultimate goal is to enable robots to identify and isolate the causal features that people actually care about and use when they represent states and behavior. Our idea is that we can tune into this representation by asking users what behaviors they consider similar: behaviors will be similar if the features that matter are similar, even if low-level behavior is different; conversely, behaviors will be different if even one of the features that matter differs. This, in turn, is what enables the robot to disambiguate between what needs to go into the representation versus what is spurious, as well as what aspects of behavior can be compressed together versus not. The notion of learning representations based on similarity has a nice parallel in contrastive learning, a self-supervised representation learning technique that maps visually similar data points to similar embeddings, where similarity is defined by a designer through data augmentation heuristics. By contrast, in order to learn the representations that people use, so we can learn their preferences and objectives, we use their definition of similarity. In simulation as well as in a user study, we show that learning through such similarity queries leads to representations that, while far from perfect, are indeed more generalizable than self-supervised and task-input alternatives.

We address the problem of extracting key steps from unlabeled procedural videos, motivated by the potential of Augmented Reality (AR) headsets to revolutionize job training and performance. We decompose the problem into two steps: representation learning and key steps extraction. We employ self-supervised representation learning via a training strategy that adapts off-the-shelf video features using a temporal module. Training implements self-supervised learning losses involving multiple cues such as appearance, motion and pose trajectories extracted from videos to learn generalizable representations. Our method extracts key steps via a tunable algorithm that clusters the representations extracted from procedural videos. We quantitatively evaluate our approach with key step localization and also demonstrate the effectiveness of the extracted representations on related downstream tasks like phase classification. Qualitative results demonstrate that the extracted key steps are meaningful to succinctly represent the procedural tasks.

Object movement identification is one of the most researched problems in the field of computer vision. In this task, we try to classify a pixel as foreground or background. Even though numerous traditional machine learning and deep learning methods already exist for this problem, the two major issues with most of them are the need for large amounts of ground truth data and their inferior performance on unseen videos. Since every pixel of every frame has to be labeled, acquiring large amounts of data for these techniques gets rather expensive. Recently, Zhao et al. [1] proposed one of a kind Arithmetic Distribution Neural Network (ADNN) for universal background subtraction which utilizes probability information from the histogram of temporal pixels and achieves promising results. Building onto this work, we developed an intelligent video surveillance system that uses ADNN architecture for motion detection, trims the video with parts only containing motion, and performs anomaly detection on the trimmed video.

Recent advances in deep learning have enabled us to address the curse of dimensionality (COD) by solving problems in higher dimensions. A subset of such approaches of addressing the COD has led us to solving high-dimensional PDEs. This has resulted in opening doors to solving a variety of real-world problems ranging from mathematical finance to stochastic control for industrial applications. Although feasible, these deep learning methods are still constrained by training time and memory. Tackling these shortcomings, Tensor Neural Networks (TNN) demonstrate that they can provide significant parameter savings while attaining the same accuracy as compared to the classical Dense Neural Network (DNN). In addition, we also show how TNN can be trained faster than DNN for the same accuracy. Besides TNN, we also introduce Tensor Network Initializer (TNN Init), a weight initialization scheme that leads to faster convergence with smaller variance for an equivalent parameter count as compared to a DNN. We benchmark TNN and TNN Init by applying them to solve the parabolic PDE associated with the Heston model, which is widely used in financial pricing theory.

As language models have grown in parameters and layers, it has become much harder to train and infer with them on single GPUs. This is severely restricting the availability of large language models such as GPT-3, BERT-Large, and many others. A common technique to solve this problem is pruning the network architecture by removing transformer heads, fully-connected weights, and other modules. The main challenge is to discern the important parameters from the less important ones. Our goal is to find strong metrics for identifying such parameters. We thus propose two strategies: Cam-Cut based on the GradCAM interpretations, and Smooth-Cut based on the SmoothGrad, for calculating the importance scores. Through this work, we show that our scoring functions are able to assign more relevant task-based scores to the network parameters, and thus both our pruning approaches significantly outperform the standard weight and gradient-based strategies, especially at higher compression ratios in BERT-based models. We also analyze our pruning masks and find them to be significantly different from the ones obtained using standard metrics.

An oft-cited open problem of federated learning is the existence of data heterogeneity at the clients. One pathway to understanding the drastic accuracy drop in federated learning is by scrutinizing the behavior of the clients' deep models on data with different levels of "difficulty", which has been left unaddressed. In this paper, we investigate a different and rarely studied dimension of FL: ordered learning. Specifically, we aim to investigate how ordered learning principles can contribute to alleviating the heterogeneity effects in FL. We present theoretical analysis and conduct extensive empirical studies on the efficacy of orderings spanning three kinds of learning: curriculum, anti-curriculum, and random curriculum. We find that curriculum learning largely alleviates non-IIDness. Interestingly, the more disparate the data distributions across clients the more they benefit from ordered learning. We provide analysis explaining this phenomenon, specifically indicating how curriculum training appears to make the objective landscape progressively less convex, suggesting fast converging iterations at the beginning of the training procedure. We derive quantitative results of convergence for both convex and nonconvex objectives by modeling the curriculum training on federated devices as local SGD with locally biased stochastic gradients. Also, inspired by ordered learning, we propose a novel client selection technique that benefits from the real-world disparity in the clients. Our proposed approach to client selection has a synergic effect when applied together with ordered learning in FL.